Book description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION, PLUS EXTENSIVE NOTES AND REFERENCES BY HERMIONE LEE
This volume combines two books which were among the greatest
contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form
a brilliant attack on sexual inequality. A Room of One's Own,
first published in 1929, is a witty, urbane and persuasive argument
against the intellectual subjection of women, particularly women
writers. The sequel, Three Guineas, is a passionate polemic
which draws a startling comparison between the tyrannous hypocrisy of
the Victorian patriarchal system and the evils of fascism.
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir
Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National
Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the
painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of
'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and
writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a
powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social
reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was
published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's
Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia
Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this
time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the
publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917,
hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.
Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded
as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the
poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also
maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction,
journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive
Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a
passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was
often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had
suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few
months before the publication of her final novel, Between the
Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
